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Wow, I can't believe that 2011 is almost over. It's been quite a year, and continuing the theme, I'd like to share my own subjective look at some of the highlights - the Year in Review on Notes from Rational Support.

This is not an inclusive
list of all the best content on NFRS in 2011. In order to get that, you
might as well sit back and read the whole year. Or maybe you just want the IEA (IBM Education Assistant) stuff. Or posts on ClearCase. Or Jazz. You can explore our content by tags.

And, of course, this is my own opinion as to some of the best, most useful, informative,
or just plain fun posts on this blog. Your opinion can and probably
does differ. So what did I miss? Is there a particular bit that made
your day in 2011? Let us know in the comments!

Yes, if there has been one unending refrain this year on this blog, it has been:

Gimme Shelter!

Oops!

Gimme Feedback!

By now, you know why. We've shared with you what we do with the feedback we receive - we use it to make our support content even better so you don't HAVE to call and open a support ticket just to find out if X is supported, or how to do Y.

So all year long, we make sure we address your comments and continually improve our content.

Sometimes, we get it right, and sometimes, you let us know that we've gotten it right. I'm not going to lie ... those are my favorite pieces of feedback to read and share.

And today, as we wrap up the year, I'd love to highlight some of the positive Document Level Feedback comments we've received this year:

"Es exactamente la respuesta al problema. Perfecto.'

"Very helpful and clear"

"Solution exposée claire et précise. Merci"

"This is a very useful page, thank you."

"Wish this was a built-in feature of the Analysis Wizard, but this a good workaround. Thanks for posting."

"This is very valuable technote. Please give it high priority to display it in search results."

"The answer was on the money"

"Finally I could resolve my problem. Thanks! "

"The solution worked perfectly.""Very useful, thank you."'

As you might imagine, this feedback from clients makes our day.

So, as we wrap up the year, a heartfelt thank you goes out to those who, having gotten the answer
they were looking for, took the extra step and let us know about it.

In 2009, Rational Support started a channel on YouTube. We have worked to introduce new videos, reference videos from the channels of our colleagues, and introduce more Rational products to the channel. This year, we had video contributions from Rational products like ClearCase, ClearQuest, and Synergy. We are also excited with our growing number of subscribers, which is approaching 300 this month! Thank you for checking us out!

We are looking to produce more videos and introduce more products to the channel in 2012. As always we appreciate and use your feedback to
continue improving. Remember to use YouTube video feedback to let us know how we are doing. Also, by filling out our 2011 social business survey, you can help us improve with our other social business areas like this blog, Facebook and Twitter!

To wrap things up for Rational Support on YouTube in 2011, here is a look at this year's most viewed videos:

2011 was an active year for Rational in the IBM Education Assistant space. Thanks to the efforts of Rational Support and Development, we were able to produce 80 new modules at the time of this posting! Several products made their first appearances on the site in 2011, including Rational Developer for Power Systems, Rational Synergy, Rational System Architect, and Rational Rhapsody.

We hope you enjoy this content. As always we appreciate and use your feedback to continue improving. If you see a survey when viewing content on the IBM Education Assistant website, take a few moments to let us know how we are doing. Also, by filling out our 2011 social business survey, you can help us improve with our social business areas like this blog, Facebook and Twitter!

To wrap things up for IBM Education Assistant in 2011, here is a look at this year's most viewed modules:

We've been talking about KCS (Knowledge Centered Support) for quite a while now. In the past we've shown you the top reused docs for various products in the month prior. In the spirit of the end of year wrap-ups, however, today we provide you with the top reused docs of 2011 across all product sets. These are the docs which were used most often to helped solve your reported cases (PMRs) over the year. We figure if our TSEs are using these docs to help you, then it stands to reason that more of you who aren't calling in can also use these to help solve your issues as well!

One request though: we'd love it if you'd let us know if the content we show you here (or in other Blog posts/ Tweets/ or Facebook posts) has ever been helpful to you (or not) through our short social business survey... we'd be eternally grateful for your input and feedback: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/G8SFMY6

7019500: System Requirements for Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software, Version 8.0.x

We truly hope these documents help you find answers to your questions or product issues. Along with the survey above which closes at the end of the year, don't forget you can also provide feedback directly on the document through IBM.com as well! This document feedback is constantly reviewed by the authors to improve each document and your own ability to find the solutions you need:

Thrilled to be able to bring you a special message from our Vice President, Wendy Toh:

Everyone,

As we wrap up 2011, I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on the year's accomplishments. Over the past 12 months, IBM Rational has delivered a lot of new capabilities and offerings to our clients. The Rational Client Support team has spent the year helping our clients upgrade and deploy many products ranging from AppScan to Clearcase to our CLM products to Rhapsody. We also held 8 very successful Voice of the Client events worldwide to engage directly with our forward-thinking clients in getting feedback on our strategy and development plans. Even as we strive to deliver high-quality offerings and superior client support, my team and I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the notion of quality as perceived by our clients. Overall we see declining problems (PMRs) and defects (APARs) being reported against Rational products. However, we also know that our customers are struggling with deployment of complex multi-product integrations, upgrade/migration issues, and in some cases, lack of sufficient quality documentation. As such, we need to find new ways to capture, measure, and improve how clients perceive the quality of our products. The current quality measurements around PMRs and APARs are necessary, but not sufficient, to identify the areas of improvements we have to target. I have been spending time talking to many customers to get your perspective on this issue and we are now implementing Perceived Quality measurements that helps us better understand the client experience, in aggregate, with our products. It also helps us pinpoint quality gaps so we can put in place actions to address. I plan to share more information on this initiative at our VoiCE of the Client event at Innovate 2012 in Orlando, Florida, so I hope you'll join me there.I want to end by thanking our Rational clients for your business. It's been my pleasure meeting and getting to know many of you in 2011. It is my and my team's passion to partner with you to successfully deploy our products to deliver business value for you. I look forward to our continued collaboration in 2012. I wish you a healthy and happy holiday season!

Yesterday we received an AppScan question on Twitter, and thought that the answer and a search tip provided may add even more value and visibility via the blog here than a short 140 characters conversation would allow...

To paraphrase and sum up the question:

Where can I find something on AppScan that's more in-depth than the "Automated vulnerability scanning" article?.... Looking for into on Manual Explore vs. Multi-step operations, and Glass Box testing.

But, what I think is even more important than just the above direct links is the following information we also provided regarding searching for content after the client noted that Information Centers vs. developerWorks caused some confusion...

Information Centers (ICs) are product documentation in the form of user/admin guides and product help, while developerWorks is more geared towards technical articles, blogs, trials/demos, forums, etc.

This search facility will return results from ICs and developerWorks alike, as well as content from our Support Portal allowing you to search all three repositories from a single page. Depending on your needs and specific query, this should provide you with the biggest result set to filter from, and in my estimation the best place to start if you aren't sure where the information lives. If you find you get too much returned from dW and the information centers or just want to filter by only support content, then you can use the Support Portal search via www.ibm.com/support

We hope this little tip helps you in finding the content you need to answer your questions or solve those pesky little problems. Let us know your thoughts on this tip, tweeted product info, or anythign else via our short 6 question (and one is even optional!) social business survey... quick, before it closes!http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/G8SFMY6

Now that you've heard how much content we've created and updated based on your reported PMRs using the KCS principles, let's take a look at how we shared it all out!

2011 was unquestionably the year of social business across industries. In keeping with Rational Support's own strategies we drove higher visibility to our support content through a number of channels, and built substantial followings in each area.

In the course of the past year, we:

Increased our Twitter followers by over 61% YoY (year over year), feeding more technical content to more followers daily!

Increased our Facebook followers by 66% YoY, aggregating downloads, videos, and blog posts to more people as well!

Increased our blog readership by 56% average YoY, again, more people seeing our support generated content

Increased blog page views by 64% average YoY, which shows you all are viewing more than one page per visit. Sit and stay a while

Authored and published over 290 distinct blog posts solely for Notes from Rational Support's blog. Over one post per business day, getting you timely support content every working day of the year.

Surpassed 1.47 million total visits to the Notes from Rational Support Blog. That's a lot of visits, telling us you come back time and time again...

Achieved a blog ranking of 5th overall most visited blog out of 1300+ blogs on developerWorks! An amazing achievement given the quality and breadth of blogs across the developerWorks site, wow!

But these numbers are only indicators of our overall success. Our real successes are found in YOUR successes; when you find an answer or solution to a problem because of content we've created and/or shared, when you save time and effort in looking for information because we've shared out the right content at the right time for you... or by simply being the go-to people able to provide the solutions when you need answers or help.

We always strive to be as open, transparent, and authentic as possible and we think that is reflected in the organic growth we've seen above in the past year. Do you agree? Think differently? Let us know in our six question social survey here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/G8SFMY6

Over the course of the next two weeks, here on Notes from Rational Support, we will be blogging some year end wrap ups and messages to highlight some of our accomplishments over the past year in terms of support knowledge and social sharing.

Today we start it all off with a look into our support generated content (did ya catch the play on words with the left hand image there?):

You may know this support generated content as Technotes, FAQs, Troubleshooting docs, or just product support information you find via the IBM Support Portal. In all cases this is content created by support to help you find answers to your product related questions. The past few years you've heard us talk about KCS (Knowledge Centered Support) and how it benefits you all when looking for solutions to issues you may encounter. Implementing the KCS principles means that we strive to create or reuse content for every PMR (problem management record) that comes in to the support crews.

Across the board, our Rational Support Teams have achieved a solid 93.5% KCS participation rate; meaning that we have identified content that either already existed and was reused, or content that was created for 93% of all PMR arrivals in 2011. That means this year we have created and updated over 18% of our total support content as available on IBM.com based on your PMRs alone. (That doesn't even touch the additional updates made based on your document level feedback which we will address in a future blog post!) Yes, over the course of 2011 we have added a substantial set of new content and updated existing content to be more accurate, more detailed, and easier to find on IBM.com.

When you consider that we in IBM Rational Support alone maintain well over 50 thousand support generated documents, 18% in a single year suddenly becomes a much larger chance at finding a quick answer on your own or from a Technical Support Engineer (TSE) when opening a PMR! That is over 25 support documents per day, every day of the year including weekends! If you also own other IBM products, just imagine the substantial volume of support content available to you... or better yet, don't imagine, check out the IBM Support Portal and see for yourself!